


glitteronthefloortonight

by apollos



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Dancing, Drinking, Gay Bar, Glitter, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Makeup, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 00:30:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20684513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Dennis and Mac try out The Rainbow in the summer of 2001.





	glitteronthefloortonight

"We're not going to run into anybody we know, Mac, Jesus." Summer, 2001. Mac and Dennis stand elbow-to-elbow in their bathroom mirror in the old apartment, the ratty one-bedroom with the broken plumbing and stained walls. Mac plays with the gel in his hair, considering spikes before just slicking it back like always, while Dennis runs a brush filled with glitter over his cheekbones and turns his head from this way and that way to consider himself. Dennis's makeup shit covers half the sink, pots and porcelain sticky with creams and sparkles. Mac wants to tell him _you look good, you look hot_, but Dennis hasn't asked, so Mac doesn't say anything. They crackle in the yellowy lighting. Dennis keeps talking, leaning into the grimy mirror. "We don't _know _any gay people. We're going to exhibit discreteness, and I assume the others will as well."

Mac shifts his weight from one foot to another, stares at themselves. Dennis: shirtless, nipple rings catching the light, sharp angles like one of those optical illusions, the stairs that you can't figure out how they go and every time you try you wind up more confused. Mac: in a black muscle shirt, unshaved scruff, tattoos on his arms, baggy camo pants spilling over catalog-issue work boots. Their shoulders touch.

It had been Dennis's idea. He heard about the place from one of the people at their bar, and he didn't say it but Mac knows that it was probably in a derogatory context, a homophobic rant. If Mac had been there, he would have joined in, would have said all sorts of things about gay bars and sin and how unnatural it is and Sodom and God sending some locusts their way sometime soon. Would have run his big mouth just as he always does. But he wasn't there, Dennis was, behind the bar with his sleeves pushed up and a rag over his shoulder and probably trying to pick up chicks, and Dennis reported the information back to Mac: there's a gay bar nearby. And Dennis reported his intention back to Mac: we're going to go.

"Do couples go to these sorts of things?" Dennis muses, lifting his chin. He's applied some sort of gloss to his lips, too, that shine more subtlety than that on his cheekbones, mostly makes them look pinker and plumper than they have any right to be.

"I don't know," Mac says. He curls his fingers into his palms. He doesn't know, doesn't want to know. Dennis knows, of course, but Dennis knows all sorts of things Mac never tries to tap into. He tells himself he's too stupid to understand the meanings behind Dennis's words, behind his _choice _of words.

"Well, anyway." Dennis turns to Mac and smiles, grabs him around the shoulders and pulls him into a hug. "Let's have some fun."

"Dude, are you—rubbing my hair?" Mac pulls back and looks in the mirror: Dennis has rubbed some of the glitter off in Mac's hair. "Dude!" he says again, combing his hands through to try and get it out. "Gay!"

Dennis laughs, then pats Mac on the ass, hurries him out of the bathroom.

Dark and low-lit and loud. Men in varying conditions scattered about, talking to each other, dancing on each other, kissing. Sweaty bodies mashed together, like any other bar Mac's ever been to, but the energy here is different, infectious, thick enough that Mac tastes it in his mouth. As soon as the door swings behind them Dennis's hands are on Mac: he slots his fingers into Mac's back pocket, keeps him close to his side. Mac straightens his back, tries not to hunch too much into Dennis, but he thinks the message Dennis sends is loud and clear: _taken, taken, taken, marked, occupied, don't try to mess with what's mine_.

Mac should do the same. Mac wraps an arm around Dennis's waist, touches the naked skin stretched over his ribs with his fingertips. Dennis doesn't jump back or shriek or slap Mac, so Mac thinks maybe he's allowed to do that, here. Dennis leads them through a group of men, smug smile on his face, and to the bar, and Mac thinks: _I am being shown off._

"Are you showing me off?" he shouts at Dennis while Dennis orders for them, tequila shots.

"Hell yeah, baby!" Dennis sits on a stool but doesn't let Mac, just swivels sideways so he can pull Mac between his legs, keep him there. Peacock feathers rustling, and a buzz up Mac's spine—he feels drunk already, he feels powerful. He feels wanted, he feels badass. He looks into his eyes before the bartender—older than them but not by much, frosted tips and blue eyes, on the skinnier side, wearing a smile that looks more like his normal expression than not—pours their drinks. Mac expects to be kissed, this close, but that doesn't happen. Dennis just takes the shots from the counter and shimmies his arm between them to give one to Mac, then takes his. Mac watches Dennis's Adam's apple bob. Mac presses his thumb there and Dennis squeezes his knees around Mac's thighs, and some song with a shrieky female voice croons in the background, lights flashing in colors Mac can't identify across Dennis's face, and the bartender lingering, and other men who both know and don't know what they're missing out on, Dennis here, on this pedestal, a trophy, a siren on a rock.

Three shots later and they haven't moved. "Den," Mac whines, squirming between his legs. He's hard, unfortunately, has been since Dennis put his hand in his back pocket, but it's getting worse every time Dennis sucks the lime and licks the salt and pulls Mac closer, closer, closer, metal of the nipple rings scratching against Mac's thin shirt, mouthing along Mac's bare biceps, his shoulders, leaving a trail of tequila taste. Lime and salt, lime and salt, and a little sweet, Mac's skin tinging pink with Dennis's lip gloss, his glitter. "Let's dance."

"Another shot," Dennis says. He pulls Mac down by the back of his neck and whispers in his ear, "Don't wanna share."

Mac could say, _we could do this at home_, but they couldn't do this at home, so he lets Dennis ferry the tequila in his mouth and he falls, not so much drunk as overwhelmed, onto Dennis on the stool below him, and Dennis laughs and laughs and laughs until Mac hears that much more than the popping bass of the music and the sounds of men shouting over it.

Mac gets his wish: Dennis dances with him. Mac is too buzzed and too heady to remember properly, the knowledge slipping from his hands like a bundle of snakes in themselves, but he thinks there's something about making a wish at the end of a rainbow. If you can find the end of the rainbow, that is—more than the pot of gold, you can make a _wish_. Mac doesn't need gold. Money is always good, yeah, but Mac knows how to live without it and Mac knows that he doesn't have to do that anymore with Dennis. No—Mac has a million other wishes, and all million involve Dennis, and all million involve the way Dennis's hands slide around his thighs and ass and hips and he sucks on his own mouth and says the filthiest, most wrong things to Mac. Here, the Rainbow: and Mac is starting to understand that as a symbol, watching the spotlights flash across Dennis's pale body, the miasma of _things _passing through Mac like laser beams, like Star Wars, like the Space Mountain ride at Disney, a high school trip with Dennis's family, squeezing Dennis's hand on the roller coaster and screaming for a thousand, a million, reasons.

Dennis complies as Mac yanks him to the dance floor, brings him in. His hands hover over Dennis's hips, Dennis's back to him, and Dennis starts: arms over his head, grinding, then reaching behind to grab Mac by around the ass, brings him closer so Mac can mimic thrusting. It's lewd, it's nothing like dancing's supposed to be, not between two men, men don't dance with each other, but Mac loves it and he loves Dennis and he loves this place and he never wants it to end. Temptation swirls around him, the lights and the noise and the tastes and the feelings, and Mac, weak as always, gives in, drinks it like the shot, chases it by swirling Dennis around and kissing him on the dance floor, hot and open-mouthed. Tequila and salt and lime and that undercurrent of something sweet. The feel of the inside of Dennis's teeth and Dennis's hand on Mac's face, too tender for such a moment, Mac feels tears prick at his eyes, Mac thinks, _not now, _Mac stops thinking.

They don't meet anybody they know there, no Charlie or Dee or Schmitty or high school assholes or Dennis's old frat brothers or acquaintances of acquaintances. They dance and drink until the arches of their feet wind up tight with pain and their legs shake beneath them and then they pile into a cab, where Dennis pays the guy a little extra, says, _keep your mouth shut_ as he dips his hand into Mac's pants and drags his fingers around Mac's cock, pulling Mac as close to him as he can in the backseat, legs in Mac's lap and mouth working his neck. They go to their apartment and they fuck on the floor, glitter rolling off them still to be swept up years later, greasy and sweaty and loud and raw and—

In the dead of night, dark, still on the floor, a thin and ratty Irish flag Mac had given Dennis to hang in his dorm room and that now rests over the back of their curbside couch pulled as a makeshift blanket. Their bare thighs together underneath it, Mac flipping one of Dennis's nipple rings up and down, up and down, Dennis methodically pulling Mac's hair free from its gelled state. Mac feels less drunk and more high, like he's spent the entire day huffing glue in Paddy's backroom with Charlie rather than drinking some tequila shots and banging Dennis.

"This is what I want," Dennis slurs. He could still be pretty drunk; they drank some more, at some point, something bright and acidic looking served from a tray on the dance floor, but more than that Dennis weighs next to nothing and shots hit him hard. "Wanna go out dancing with my sexy man, every day. Make everybody so fuckin' jealous. Wanna do ecstasy and wear glitter. You with me?" He wraps his arm around Mac's neck and brings him close, so they're mouth-to-mouth, eyelash-to-eyelash. Glitter and shine and the blue of Dennis's eyes. The inside of a disco ball. "Hey, you with me?"

"Yeah. I'm with you."

Dennis asks Mac next Saturday if he wants to _go out _and Mac says, "Nah, man, maybe we should just stay at Paddy's," and that's that, that's that.

The way Dennis dances from then, for the next two decades of Mac's life: a cruel and contracted echo of that night, bending at the knees to make his hips go, keeping close to Mac but not too close, plausible deniability, _room for Jesus _between them. The perfect amount of separation. It doesn't make Mac hard anymore. It makes him broken-hearted.


End file.
